Do you know if you have ever been a part of a cultish or high-demand community? Do you know what qualities to look for in a high-demand community?

High-demand communities may bring images of cults with extreme behaviors, demands, and rituals to your mind. But when you examine the communities you love, some fall on the spectrum of cultish or high-demand communities. 

Cultish and high-demand communities fall on a spectrum, and not everyone associated with a group or organization with those tendencies necessarily falls into the trance of these spaces–but many of us do–often without noticing. 

Today’s guest got me thinking more about the high-demand or cultish communities we choose. His most recent book was inspired by his experience watching the January 6th insurrection on TV and wondering if he had not left his high-demand faith community, would he have been at the US Capitol with many who showed up that day, including some from his former community....

Your relationship with grief impacts all your relationships - whether you know it or not. 

While the experience of grief is universal, we still react to grief in ways that often stigmatize and alienate our grief or the grief of others in the name of professionalism, boundaries, and self-protection. 

And when we face a loss from suicide and all the layers and nuances of this particular type of loss, it can bring up a lot for us and those we lead. 

Disenfranchised grief refers to a loss that's not openly acknowledged, socially mourned, or publicly supported–you can see how bereavement by suicide fits one of the most common causes of disenfranchised grief. 

When people who have lost someone to suicide feel like they cannot talk about their loss without judgment or criticism, disenfranchised grief festers. It can lead to complicated grief, where our recovery and healing become persistent and debilitating to basic day-to-day functioning over a long period...

Groups are a microcosm of life and the greater systems in which we live and work.

We learn so much about ourselves and others in groups. 

They refine our leadership and communication skills. They highlight our growth edges and our capacity for conflict. And they can bring out the best - and the worst - in us, sometimes at lightning speed. 

So many of us can recall frustrating and, too often, harmful experiences working in teams. Whether it’s a team member that drags everyone down without support or burdened systems, rules, and bureaucracies that stifle creativity and energy, the words “group project” bring up a lot of feelings.

What comes up when you think about your group or team experiences? And when preparing to join or lead a group or a team, what fears or concerns go through your mind?

Today, I’m excited to welcome back Charlie Gilkey to discuss his new book, Team Habits. He addresses many of the pain points and fears many of us hold...

 When you look back on your career trajectory, what do you notice? 

Do you see an even trajectory in your career path? Or has your career taken some hard curves outside of the expected norms? 

What can seem like a setback in our planned career path can sometimes lead us to experiences that we would never have pursued - opening us up to ideas and possibilities that we would never have imagined.

It is moments like these that can often help us break free from the machine of proving, striving, and grinding and actually reconnect to who we truly are and what we really want to contribute with our lives.  

Of course it’s true that setbacks in our professional plans can be costly, painful, and downright scary. Some of the pain of setbacks can take a toll on our confidence and well-being and finances. 

But the time between paths, as we hop off the hamster wheels of shoulds to figure out who we are and what we want to do, isn’t wasted.

Today’s guest...

Do you have a relationship with play?

Do you integrate time to play into your life around work and rest?

Or does play feel elusive or like a luxury?

If it does, you’re not alone.

So many of us are weary and weighed down, trying to stay afloat while keeping up with life, work, and being engaged citizens. And we live in a culture that continues to prioritize work and productivity over play and rest.

But building a relationship with play can be an antidote to toxic hustle productivity. And play can help quiet the noise in our minds and temporarily distract us from our burdens, leaving us in a better place to come back and tackle them.

Today, I’m so excited to dig into the benefits of play with Gary Ware.

Gary Ware, the Founder of Breakthrough Play, is a corporate facilitator, keynote speaker, certified coach, and author of the book Playful Rebellion: Maximize Workplace Success Through The Power of Play. Gary has over 14 years of experience in the corporate world...

Have you ever wondered if you are too much or too needy? 

We carry a lot of baggage around our needs, others’ needs, and the many mixed messages about having needs but doing everything possible to not be seen as ‘being needy’.

The result? A relentless pursuit to keep our needs hidden, fueling feelings of scarcity, shame, and worry.

But needs are an inherent part of being human.

In a society that has weaponized needs so that if you need, you are “needy,” the idea of expressing our needs even evokes fear and shame.

And we’ve created a moral binary around needs–good to have needs, bad to be needy, or good to help people but bad to be helped–which is exhausting and only serves to prop up the myth of rugged individualism.

Today’s guest joins me for a deep dive exploring our complicated relationship with needs and neediness. Mara Glatzel is the author of the book Needy, and we’re digging into how we come to see our...

Inclusion.

It’s a word that evokes strong emotions and reactions for many people. Some see it as a polarizing issue that elicits extreme rhetoric, while others recognize the need for us to confront discomfort and take responsibility for the impact of our leadership.

We have to consider what inclusion means to us, what it feels like, and how it shows up in our work and personal lives.

Because all too often, inclusion is reduced to a performative, box-checking act, instead of an opportunity to invest time, resources, and effort towards sustainable building inclusivity.

In a world that values efficiency and productivity, embracing inclusion can be uncomfortable. It requires introspection, cultural change, and a departure from traditional notions of power.

Inclusion is inconvenient because it compels us to think differently and confront our own biases. It also reveals how those in dominant cultures often prioritize their own inclusion, sometimes at the expense of others.

But true...

Are you a safe person? 

Do you cultivate and lead spaces that are safe? 

And how do you know the difference between lack of safety and discomfort? 

The hard truth is that we can never declare a person or a space “safe.” We can do all we can to cultivate safety within ourselves and we can be intentional about doing our best to be safe but we cannot name a space or a person safe. That is for others to decide. Which is vulnerable and challenging. 

If we want to increase our capacity for discomfort and work towards being safe, it will require us to get really clear on how we can be unsafe along with discerning the difference between safety and discomfort.

And if we truly want to be a part of cultivating safe spaces and be safe people to others, we have to build our capacity for discomfort to: be wrong, make mistakes, be misunderstood, set and maintain boundaries, speak up when harm happens, and take ownership of our part when harm is done. This is...

Conflict and discomfort are inevitable–in all areas of our work and life. 

Now, most of us carry some kind of relational or betrayal trauma.

And these burdens impact how we lead and move through conflict, discomfort, and difference. 

So when a rupture happens, there is often a rush to find comfort with some kind of a bid for repair. But if we do not do the work to reflect on our own systems’ needs first, we can end up doing more harm and continue to feel hooked by a situation.

Without this internal reflection, we can often default to actions that result in the opposite of our desired intention.

But this work gives us more choices and when we have more choices, we are less likely to feel trapped, panicked, and stuck. 

And when we feel like we have more agency in our relationships, we feel more connected and close to those we lead and love. 

Toni Herbine-Blank is the founder and director of the Intimacy from the Inside Out© training...

Your past experiences and relationships inform how you lead and run your business today, whether you are aware of it or not.

Overworking, perfectionism, fear of failure, crappy boundaries due to people pleasing or micro-managing can all stem from our relational history. 

One of the more insidious aspects of trauma that can impact leaders and entrepreneurs is relational trauma, which can be difficult to identify and heal.

Unhealed relational trauma wounds often lie outside of our awareness leading to an unconscious drive to repeat the painful patterns we experienced in our present-day business and leadership.

My guest today wrote an email last summer about the connection between her relational trauma and how she is setting up her current business. She detailed some of the systems she has in place so she can serve the best right fit people while also protecting her energy and making sure she is not replicating her relational trauma in her business. I immediately sent her a...